NEWS IN A DYING LANGUAGE

If New York’s newspaper publishers want to win over the city’s new residents, they might benefit from a few Yiddish lessons.

For one naïve and splendid moment last spring, the newspaper romantics of New York believed they had a chance to claim the Post as their own. While lawyers piled up fortunes haggling over who would own the paper and who would owe what to whom, reporters in the riverfront newsroom paced nervously on a carpet the color of dried blood. “I hate this,” one reporter, Colin Miner, said. “I just want to get back to dead bodies and chalk lines.” Miner was young and had been only recently hired, but he had thoroughly inhaled the spirit of South Street. Meanwhile, Pete Hamill, the momentary editor of the paper and its would-be Lord Byron, sat near his office window and watched a loaded barge glide into the spidery shadows cast by the Brooklyn Bridge.

“You wanna know what I think would be God’s paper?” Hamill said, rising from his chair. (He was then assuming that the Post might be his to reinvent.) “It would be a tabloid that’s smart and hip, knowing. The tone of Rupert Murdoch’s papers was always naïve, like ‘Holy Shit! They’re Having Sex!’ You can have classic tabloid sex and violence, but better, well written, and accurate. God’s paper would have a coalition of audiences. We’d appeal to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Dominicans, Ecuadoreans, Haitians—the new immigrants. That’s New York’s future salvation. Anyone who still reads a newspaper is part of an aspiring class—the people who aren’t zonked out yet on ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ We’d try to get the kids of the immigrants, the first generation of English-speakers. Cover immigration. Have a green-card columnist. Make a feature section. Cover the streets. Even the foreign stuff would reflect the community. Cover the best murder trial in Tel Aviv. Get into the Caribbean. The paper’s got to reflect the city more accurately than by just having drug dealers and guys in handcuffs plastered across the front page.”

Hamill, who had made a career as a columnist by evoking a chiaroscuro New York of noble pugs and clubhouse hacks, was dreaming. And, what was more, he knew it. From the beginning, Rupert Murdoch had been the only participant in the negotiations with the will and the means to win the Post, and he would never hand the paper over to the likes of Hamill. It was depressing, then, to hear the cheer go up in the newsroom when it was finally announced that the owner of the Post would indeed be Rupert, Redux. Some jobs had been saved (though not Colin Miner’s), but the Post would go on as a cynical paper—a right-wing feuilleton for the city’s conservatives and an object of high camp for the rest. Still, it had been fine to hear a newspaperman dream, if only for a little while.

Just before Hamill gave way to the inevitable, he’d said he thought that one of the greatest models for any other newspaper was the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward. Like most Irish Catholics of his generation, Hamill’s fluency in Yiddish was limited to words for sandwich meats and forms of human stupidity: it was the idea of the Forward he was responding to—the Forward as the king of New York’s ethnic newspapers. For more than a hundred and fifty years, publishers in New York have put out papers to capture the new arrivals at Ellis Island and Castle Garden and J.F.K. as they stood blinking into the sun, starved for news and instruction. The best of those papers have been immigration primers, guides to the mysteries and manners of the New World. Signs of the old immigrations persist. France-Amérique, which began publication in 1828, is hanging on, if barely, and so is the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (1834). Il Progresso (1880) folded in 1989, having been overtaken by a new Italian daily, America Oggi. (Ethnic papers have a way of breeding before they die. Staats-Zeitung was the Teutonic seedling from which the Ridder half of the Knight-Ridder chain bloomed, while the publishers of Il Progresso, at one time a pro-Mussolini paper, begat the old New York Enquirer, which begat the National Enquirer.) In all, there are more than a hundred ethnic papers in around thirty languages published in the city, and while it is sad that there are no longer, say, eight important Chinese papers, it is remarkable that there are still four. There are also papers published in Arabic, Armenian, Creole, Estonian, Hungarian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Romansh, and Tagalog.

The Forward, which was founded in 1897, is not the oldest, but it is the model, the exemplar. At the peak of its influence, in the twenties, its circulation exceeded a quarter of a million, and in 1947 its fiftieth anniversary was celebrated at Madison Square Garden. It was once so powerful a paper that it helped engineer the election of a Socialist, Meyer London, to Congress. (That happened in 1914.) But no more. The Forward has been a weekly for a decade, and, having reached the age of ninety-six, it will count itself lucky if it can celebrate its centenary. It is written in a dying language for a geriatric population. Circulation is sclerotic, fourteen thousand being the official, and highly generous, assessment. Mordecai Strigler, a diminutive scholar with thick glasses and titanic energy, who is the present editor, has so much trouble finding writers able to communicate in Yiddish that he often writes half the paper himself. Over a period of forty years, he has used about thirty pseudonyms, A. Kore (A Reader), A. Ben-Ami (Son of the People), M. Ragil (A Simple Person), and Z. Kamai (An Old-Fashioned Man) among them. The most reliably generous section of the paper is the obituaries. Such is the state of Yiddish. In her story “Envy, Or Yiddish in America” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil?”

The Forward these days is the product of four full-time staff members. Strigler is seventy-two, and the three others—the managing editor, Joseph Mlotek; the contributing editor, Abraham Wilk; and the news editor, Jacob Goldstein—are even older. “I come in, and here someone is sick, there someone is sick, so I have to finish things on my own,” Strigler told me one afternoon. He slumped in his chair and raised his brows, Yiddishly, toward Heaven. “What can I do?”

The Forward’s offices are in the Workmen’s Circle building, on East Thirty-third Street, a flavorless site compared with the former headquarters, down on East Broadway. (The old Forward building, with some of its Yiddish pediments still in place, is now a Chinese cultural center.) By newspaper standards, the offices are quiet and trig. They reflect the prim neatness of the aged. But the modern era does intrude. Management has replaced the old Linotype machines with Apple computers and Yiddish software. And although the paper has a tradition of left-leaning secularism, the typesetters are Orthodox, since it is the Orthodox, and especially the Hasidim, who keep Yiddish alive as a language of daily conversation. (Hebrew, the sacred tongue, is usually reserved for prayer and religious scholarship.)

“The older people don’t want to hear it when you say it’s all dying,” Strigler told me recently. “The Lubavitcher Hasidim speak Yiddish, but they don’t want to read our writing. They have their own separate world—even their own paper, Algemeiner Journal. I don’t know who I’m writing for anymore. Maybe two hundred younger people read us. But they are passive. They are not in the conversation. They are only observers of this old world. My daughter tries now to learn Yiddish. She is twenty-five. She’s very interested. But if she and her generation will be readers of our newspaper I don’t believe it. It’s too late, because there are pockets of speakers but they don’t have what to do. If they can be a rabbi or a lawyer, what have they to do with us?” Fortunately for Yiddish, Strigler’s energy is legion. He edits the Forward in the morning and then walks to another office, in Chelsea, to put together a distinguished Yiddish-language magazine of politics and culture, the biweekly Yiddisher Kemfer (The Fighter). It is as if one man were running (and largely writing) both the Times and The New York Review of Books.

Like so many of his colleagues and his readers, Strigler has led the epic life of a survivor. Born near the Polish city of Lublin, he was ordained as a rabbi when he was sixteen. As a teacher in Warsaw, he was thrown into the crucible of the war with Germany. When the Nazis broke through the barricades with their tanks, the Poles pointed to him and said, “Jew.” The Nazi soldiers hauled Strigler off to a concentration camp, and carved swastikas into his cheeks and forehead with a razor blade. Over the next five years, he was sent from one concentration camp or slave-labor camp to another. He lost his parents and four of his sisters in the Holocaust. In 1945, an American journalist and writer named Meyer Levin went to the Buchenwald camp after it was liberated, and there he interviewed Strigler for what became the book “In Search.” Strigler described how he managed, mostly through sheer luck, to survive to the end of the war. He talked of how Nazi soldiers beat him and confiscated his manuscripts, how he saw them order people shot as unfit because of the slightest blemish. After a roundup of Jews in the Lublin area, “our camp was put on the march,” Strigler said. “We had to go fifteen miles, in a column ten abreast. They told us to run, and they rode alongside the column and fired into it all the time, our comrades dropped around us, and we filled up to ten abreast and ran, and they shot, shot, shot.” Once they had been herded into the Ishbitza ghetto, about thirty miles away from Lublin, a mass, orgiastic slaughter began. “I saw a German officer go up and look over a pretty little girl of thirteen who had just been taken off a train. Then he calmly took out his bayonet knife and ripped up her belly. I saw this.”

Strigler has always been a remarkably prolific writer. Even now, he is capable of writing a dozen articles a week on topics as various as Israel, New York politics, Biblical commentary, and the fate of Yiddish. But after he was released from Buchenwald he moved to Paris, and there he wrote as if truly possessed, spinning out a vast cycle of semifictional books on the Holocaust, which were among the first eyewitness accounts of horror: “Maydanek,” in 1947; “In Di Fabrikn Fun Toyt” (“In the Factories of Death”), in 1948; “Verk ‘Tse’ ” (“Plant C”), in 1950; and “Goyroles” (“Destinies”), in 1952. In 1953, he came to America, and he has worked here as a journalist in the Yiddish world ever since. Late in 1986, he became the editor of the Forward, succeeding the late Simon Weber. He does not wish to be its last editor, but that could turn out to be the case.

“A few years ago, I went out and tried to find an apprentice, but it was impossible,” Strigler said. “To tell you the truth, I am sure in a year or two I will not be here. Maybe I’ll go to Israel. My wife was a teacher at Hebrew University, and I don’t know how long we’ll stay here. They tell me that I can’t move to Israel, that I’m the last one that can edit the paper. That’s what they tell me.” Harold Ostroff, the general manager of the Forward Association, which runs the paper, does all he can to cajole Strigler into staying. When I asked Ostroff if he would be able to find a replacement, he said, “There may be someone in this world. I don’t see anyone in America.” The decline of writers and of the circulation is so profound, Ostroff said, that he was already thinking about going monthly, if need be.

Even in its dotage, the Forward must evoke in the greatest newspaper dynasties (to say nothing of Murdoch, of the Post, or Mortimer Zuckerman, of the News) a sense of awe. The Forward grew out of an immigration of more than two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1925—an immigration that rivals the current influx of Dominicans and Chinese, and one that forever shaped the texture of New York life. The demand for Yiddish publications in New York was so great that by 1914 more than a hundred and fifty daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and occasional journals were appearing.

Abraham Cahan, an editor of literary genius and imperious character, ruled the Forward in its golden decades—the first half of this century. Cahan had grown up in academic and revolutionary circles in Lithuania, and after he arrived in the United States, in 1882, he made a literary name for himself even before the Forward came into being. In 1895, he published a realistic novella of Jewish life on the Lower East Side. The headline over William Dean Howells’ review of “Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto,” in the New York World, read, “THE GREAT NOVELIST HAILS ABRAHAM CAHAN, THE AUTHOR OF ‘YEKL,’ AS A NEW STAR OF REALISM, AND SAYS THAT HE AND STEPHEN CRANE HAVE DRAWN THE TRUEST PICTURES OF EAST SIDE LIFE.” Cahan worked for four years at English-language newspapers, most notably with Lincoln Steffens at the Commercial Advertiser, covering murders, fires, Ellis Island, and the exploits of Buffalo Bill. By the time he settled at the Forward, in 1901, he had in mind a unique paper: one that would be a mix of shund and literatur—sensationalism and seriousness. He printed feature stories about the prostitutes on Allen Street and the peddlers on Delancey Street. He provided instructions in how to use a handkerchief, when to say “Pardon me,” how to get along with the neighbors in a communal apartment. He advised parents to feed their children fresh fruits and vegetables. He ran a contest in which readers were asked for the best definition of the word mazel (“luck”), and printed a seminal front-page story headed “THE FUNDAMENTALS OF BASEBALL EXPLAINED TO NON-SPORTS,” which was accompanied by a helpful diagram of the Polo Grounds. At the same time, he printed fiction, essays, and poems by all the great names in Yiddish literature—an accomplishment that was celebrated when Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had first published almost all of his fiction in the Forward, won the Nobel Prize, in 1978.

The Forward under Cahan, Ronald Sanders wrote in his 1969 book “The Downtown Jews,” was “a kind of running Talmudic text for the secular cultural life of the Yiddish-speaking masses.” Cahan was their secular rabbi, helping them ease their way into the New World. By far the paper’s most popular feature was called “A Bintel Brief” (“A Bundle of Letters”), in which readers gave voice to their most personal concerns and posed plaintive questions. Cahan had pleaded with his readers to “send us emmeser romanen”—true-life novels—and the readers responded with remarkably vivid descriptions of tenement life and spiritual confusion. The column, readers said, was like a combination of Dear Abby and Talmudic argument. One worried young woman wrote, “Is it a sin to use face powder? Shouldn’t a girl look beautiful? My father does not want me to use face powder. Is it a sin?” Elsewhere, mothers living in bleak poverty wondered if they should put their children up for adoption.

When the occasion demanded it, Cahan was also able to mobilize a skilled group of reporters to cover the news at least as well as the city’s English-language papers. On March 25, 1911, a huge fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a ten-story loft near Washington Square. The fire raged through the top three floors, where hundreds of girls and young women worked at their sewing machines. Fire engines arrived within ten minutes, but they could do little to stop the blaze. The water from their hoses reached only to the seventh floor and their ladders only to the sixth. Under the headline “THE MORGUE IS FULL OF OUR DEAD,” the poet and Forward reporter, Morris Rosenfeld, pieced together an astonishing account of the tragedy:

Forlornly [the crowd on the street] stood and watched as one girl after another fell, like shot birds, from above, from the burning floors. The men held out a longer time, enveloped in flames. And when they could hold out no longer, they jumped, too. Below, horrified and weeping, stood thousands of workers from the surrounding factories. They watched moving, terrible, unforgettable scenes. At one window on the eighth floor appeared a young man with a girl. He was holding her tightly by the hand. Behind them the red flames could be seen. The young man lovingly wrapped his arms around the girl and held her to him a moment, kissed her, and then let her go. . . . A moment later he leaped after her, and his body landed next to hers. Both were dead.

There were a hundred and forty-six dead, all told, and a hundred thousand people marched in a mass funeral ceremony.

Cahan was widely criticized among more religious and more intellectual Yiddish editors as a philistine bent on driving his audience into assimilation. And they were right: the Forward under Cahan was indeed a powerful instrument of assimilation. These days, Strigler and his colleagues like to say, with a sigh, that perhaps the paper did its job so well that it has put itself nearly out of business. The Forward, like the language itself, is in its preservationist stage. Aaron Lansky, a remarkable young man who in 1989 won a MacArthur “genius” award for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Yiddish books, told me, “My grandfather was a junkman in Fall River, Massachusetts, and he depended on the Forward for news. Who does that anymore? I’m afraid I can’t think of anyone I know who reads it regularly, even in my circle of Yiddishists. Maybe this tells the whole story. The Hasidim speak Yiddish, but they will not read modern, secular Yiddish literature. To them, it is heretical. One night, I got a call from a Brooklyn collector who told me I had to come right away to Brooklyn, to Brighton Beach, to something called the Beth Am Center, an old Zionist labor center that was now being sublet to the Orthodox as a yeshiva. He had discovered that when the Orthodox moved in they found a library of fifteen thousand Yiddish books and threw them all down the cellar stairs. When we came to get the books, the Orthodox just glowered at us. For them, those books were heretical, because they discussed how Jews might live in a modern world. It is a great irony that the last Jews who speak Yiddish will not read these great books, let alone the Forward.”

I doubt if there is any one paper in New York that is a worthy successor to the Forward. The Novoye Russoye Slovo (New Russian Word), which is the leading paper in Brighton Beach, is distinctively Russian, with its passion for long opinion pieces, but it lacks the flair of the best Moscow papers. El Diario-La Prensa is the leading Spanish-language paper, with a circulation of fifty thousand, and features a broad range of opinion pieces, from conservative attacks on Fidel Castro to liberal pieces on Central and South America. But by trying to be an umbrella paper for all the Hispanic groups in the city it shows how radically different the interests of the city’s Cubans and Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians are. The various groups are often better served by the imported papers available in Hispanic neighborhoods and at stores like Hotaling’s, just off Times Square, that specialize in out-of-town publications. Caribbeans, too, have New York-based papers, but the imports, like the Gleaner, from Jamaica, are more popular.

Perhaps the most ambitious and among the wealthiest of the ethnic papers is the World Journal, which is a daily financed by a Taiwan conglomerate and is the leading Chinese-language paper in the country. Tih-Wu Wang, the Citizen Kane of the conglomerate, is a gigantic figure in Taipei. A former member of Chiang Kai-shek’s military, he traded on his political and business connections to build a chain of papers in both Taiwan and North America. “The legend is he used to deliver his papers on a bicycle at the start, and now he might as well have a license to print money,” Justin Yu, the World Journal’s immigration and crime reporter, told me over a long lunch one afternoon on Mott Street. “Mr. Wang comes on Chinese New Year and holds a banquet at the Sheraton he owns, near LaGuardia. Everyone gets an envelope with a bonus.”

T. W. Wang is in his eighties and is sitting on a fortune. Taiwan sources say that years ago he bought a mountain on the island, and on that mountain he built a palace, and in that palace he built a glass floor with gold carp swimming underneath. It was a pretty effect, but this Xanadu made some squeamish local politicians very unhappy all the same, because it seemed to them an unnecessary flaunting of wealth. Soon it was announced that the estate would become a vacation center for employees. “Mr. Wang is a great story,” Justin Yu said. “He even thought about buying the Daily News. But the American market is just a chicken leg compared to what he wants. It’s peanuts compared to China.”

For the World Journal, which was founded in 1976, the story that ranks in importance with the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was the tragedy of the Golden Venture, the freighter that ran aground on the beach at Far Rockaway last June loaded with hundreds of Chinese. Justin Yu and his partner, Alex Peng, covered the story with speed and grace, not least because they had been following the nuances and cruelties of illegal immigration from China to New York for years. Justin, who tends to do most of his phone work and writing while he is sitting at a small table at the back of his wife’s toy store, in Chinatown, told me, “All the illegals come through the store. When someone comes into the toy store to buy a toothbrush, I know he’s illegal and green, right off the boat. I get all my stories that way. One guy told me how he got to Houston via Mexico via Belize and how soldiers escorted him across the Rio Grande. They took a small airplane from Mexico to the desert and were met by a minivan and driven eight or nine hours to Los Angeles. Then they came here because there are no Fukinese in Los Angeles. The Fukinese own the bad carryout places. You know, the homeless live on that two-dollar fried rice the Fukinese make.”

Alex Peng makes his reporting rounds driving an old Lincoln and wearing two beepers on his belt. Husky and intense, he is sometimes described as the Chinese Jimmy Breslin. Peng doesn’t resent the label, despite Breslin’s outburst a couple of years ago when he called a Korean-American colleague at Newsday “slant-eyed” and a “yellow cur.” Peng said, “I fully understand that Jimmy Breslin’s reputation is no good among Asians, but he is an energetic, dynamic journalist. I learned a lot from him, just by reading. He is always there, and that’s a rule: You gotta be there, you always go. If you sit in the office and work the phone, you get another kind of story.”

New York’s Chinatown is no longer limited to lower Manhattan, and one day recently Alex and I were in the Queens division, in Flushing, where many of the most prosperous Asians—from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea—have settled. (Country folk from China itself are more likely to live in the overcrowded apartments in Manhattan.) Alex switched on a tape of one of his favorite singers, Engelbert Humperdinck, gunned the engine, and hummed lightly. I told him about the letters that used to appear in the Forward’s “Bintel Brief”—letters from parents who feared that their children were losing their Yiddish and their ties to Jewish culture.

“Yeah, sure. We get letters like that,” he said. “Like ‘My children won’t go to weekend Chinese school and can’t talk Chinese. What should I do?’ Or ‘My kids won’t eat Chinese food. What should I do?’ Nothing changes.”

The World Journal publishes service information for immigrants, just as the Forward did—information on how to apply for a Social Security card, where to register to vote, where to collect your car if it has been towed, the schedule of the public libraries. But where the World Journal falls short is in its lack of independence. According to some members of the Chinese-speaking community, none of the Chinese papers in New York have shown that they are able to write in detail about, for example, the dominance of the Tongs of organized crime. The World Journal and the three other Chinese papers—the Hong Kong-financed Sing Tao, the local United Daily, and the Beijing-sponsored China Press—all tend to skip lightly over areas considered too delicate to mention. When unionized waiters at the Silver Palace, a vast dim-sum emporium on the Bowery, picketed the restaurant last August because the owners wanted to cut their health insurance and take a percentage of the tips, the papers responded with minimal, euphemistic coverage. Because nearly all the other waiters in China–town are not even unionized, and because the Tongs are so deeply involved in the restaurant business, the case had enormous importance for the community. It fell largely to the English-language press to cover the story.

Such limited coverage doesn’t seem to bother even the best of the World Journal’s reporters—or not enough, at least. “News is business,” Alex said. “Keep that in mind. Don’t position yourself as a gatekeeper or a social conscience. Of course, we talk about all that, but news is business. If there is no profit, why you wanna do that? You are not the Salvation Army. C’mon, gimme a break!”

As we drove on through Flushing, Alex said that, like the editors of the Forward, he and his colleagues who grew up speaking and reading Chinese see their own children becoming Americanized. They can speak and understand Chinese but not read it. The World Journal will not be their paper. They, too, will drift toward the News, the Post, the Times, and, most of all, to television. “We’re not counting on the younger generations to be our readers, but we have the confidence that we will always be a bridge for the newcomers,” Alex said. “My kids seem to pick up their language from TV and the street. The other day, my four-year-old called me a schmuck. What language is that?”

In the end, one of the papers that seemed most promising on my search through the city’s ethnic press was the English-language edition of the Forward. Started in 1990, it is a gigantic leap beyond much of the rest of the mainstream Jewish English-language press, which is generally so beholden to the Jewish charities for funding that it is no less cautious than World Journal and Sing Tao; the slant is often so acute that one anticipates the millennium headline “WORLD ENDS YESTERDAY; JEWS SUFFER MOST.”

The idea for an English-language Forward had been drifting around the paper’s offices ever since the other Yiddish papers in the city, like the Tog (the Day), began closing, in the early nineteen-seventies. But there was always resistance. What did English have to do with the Forverts? It was not until the early nineteen-eighties that someone came along who was ready to push the idea, and he was from outside the paper: Seth Lipsky, one of the leading writers and editors at the Wall Street Journal. Lipsky was an editor for the paper in Europe and Asia and also a member of its conservative editorial board. Like his mentor on the editorial page, Robert Bartley, he was, and still is, capable of writing in a mode just short of savagery. But, as happens with many editors easing into middle age—Lipsky is forty-seven—there came a time when he wanted his own show to run. The notion of an English Forward appealed to him more for reasons of the paper’s history than out of any allegiance to Yiddishkeit. He is, of course, Jewish, but the extent of his attachment to religious custom was revealed to me one afternoon when we sent out for sandwiches. “Ham and cheese on rye, for me,” he said. The Forward, Lipsky was quick to remind me, has always been a secular paper.

For years, Lipsky waged a campaign of noodging the Forward hierarchy—especially Simon Weber, who in 1970 had succeeded Abraham Cahan as editor, and who retained a great deal of influence at the paper even after Strigler became editor, at the end of 1986. Lipsky tried over and over again to convince the Forward Association that an English-language edition—not a mere translation but a separate entity—could one day turn a profit, and would almost certainly be a boon to Jewish journalism and learning. In advancing this cause, Lipsky visited Weber in the hospital, where the older man was recovering from a broken hip. “He was seventy-three, and in seventy-three years I don’t think he’d ever heard an idea that he regarded as quite as insane as mine,” Lipsky told me. “The Forward’s cause was secular Jewish language and literature, and along comes this kid from the Wall Street Journal.”

The idea went nowhere until the spring of 1987, when Weber was in the hospital once more—this time with a general breakdown of his health. By then, Weber had taken a liking to Lipsky, a man of firm opinions (“I’m a hardheaded liberal, you might say”) and tart good humor. There was an odd friendship between them, but the idea of an English Forward was still not moving ahead. This time, Lipsky was merciless.

“Si, look,” he said. “You are on your deathbed, and in a matter of months you’ll be gone. And, if you don’t do something, your newspaper is going to be gone with you. So if you are not willing to receive my emissary for me you should be willing to receive him for the sake of the Forward. And I expect you to do it.”

Weber was silent a long time. And then he said, with his inimitable Old World gutturals, “And khooo is this emissary?”

“It’s Sam Pisar,” Lipsky said.

Weber was impressed. “Pisar,” he said. “He can make things khappen.”

Pisar, an international lawyer and a survivor of Auschwitz, met with Weber and the members of the Forward Association in Weber’s hospital room, and could see that some of them were receptive to the idea of an English paper. They agreed to receive Lipsky.

“I came back from China to New York at my own expense,” Lipsky said, recalling the meeting. “We met on a Saturday morning. I felt like Judge Bork going before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Everything was friendly, O.K., and then Sam turns to me and says something that made me realize why he’s so brilliant. He said, ‘Seth, they don’t want to know about the easy questions. They want to know about the difficult questions.’

“ ‘Like what, Sam?’ I said.

“And he said, ‘Like Jabotinsky. Where are you on Jabotinsky?’

“A chill fell over the room. It was like walking into a meat locker. I knew right away that this was the most important moment of my life.”

It might well be appropriate at this juncture to explain the significance of the chill in the room. It was Theodor Herzl who founded modern Zionism, from a centrist, assimilated, slightly left-leaning bent. His opponent in tactics and temperament was Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian newspaperman who believed (some have said believed fanatically) in an armed struggle to create Israel. Jabotinsky organized the Haganah self-defense movement and advocated a “greater” Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. When the state was formed, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hung portraits on the wall of Herzl and Chaim Weizman. But when Menachem Begin took office, in 1977, he added one more portrait—that of Jabotinsky.

Lipsky went on, “So, finally, I said, ‘I know how you feel about Jabotinsky and how he appeared to your generation. But to my generation—or, at least, to me, looking back—the outstanding fact of Jabotinsky’s life is that he called for the evacuation of the Jews from Europe in 1932.’ What I was trying to say was that I don’t want to fight about the past, but if you really want to I’ll try to get down and mud-wrestle with you. After that, the conversation returned to an amicable plane.”

Lipsky’s dream was not realized until the Forward Association had a financial windfall. For many years, the association had owned the radio station WEVD-FM, named in honor of the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs. Known some time ago as “the station that speaks your language,” WEVD featured programming in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish. But with time some of those languages died out in the city, and some became so prevalent that they had their own stations. WEVD was, as a business, losing ground. Then, in 1989, the Spanish Broadcasting System decided it needed a New York flagship, a fifty-thousand-watt FM station. Not only did WEVD have the power but it was one of only thirteen stations with access to the transmission tower on the Empire State Building. The SBS and the Forward Association cut a deal. Harold Ostroff, who conducted the negotiations for the Forward Association, said that the total package should ultimately be worth sixty-five million dollars. Though much of the money will be a long time coming in, even a fraction of it was enough to make viable the idea of maintaining the Yiddish Forward while starting an English-language edition. Lipsky published his first issue on May 25, 1990.

To all who ask, Lipsky spins out a ditzy theory of how the English Forward could go from its current circulation, of thirteen thousand five hundred, to something five times, even fifteen times, as big. His fantasy, like Pete Hamill’s dream of God’s tabloid, is part mist, part ideology. “My theory about the newspaper market is that the billionaires circling the city look only at the tabloid flank, but the weak flank in New York is the Times,” he said. “The Times was built on a constituency of hardheaded liberals—largely Jews, though not exclusively. That constituency is shrinking in stunning numbers. The proprietors of the Times have two choices: either shrink, which is not logical, or abandon their traditional constituency and purpose, and pursue a much more culturally diverse constituency—the African-Americans, the Hispanics. They are fine constituencies, but such a move will change the content of the Times. And that will leave only one broadsheet in New York in a position to focus on that original constituency of the New York Times and to grow, especially as a daily. And that will be the Forward.”

At the instant my eyebrow lifted, Lipsky smiled.

“I see you are dubious of the proposition.”

Perhaps so.

“Well, look at it this way,” Lipsky went on. “You have seventeen hundred dailies in America, and more than half of them have circulations under fifty thousand. A daily that takes in a profit can be sold for the price of a supertanker.”

While Lipsky waits out that part of his dream, it is worth noting that the editorial contents of the English-language Forward—especially the aggressive news coverage and the sophisticated arts pages—are worthy of the Yiddish paper. From the start, Lipsky hired a range of quirky young talent, including one writer, Ilene Rosenzweig, whose previous employment had been with Street News, the paper of the homeless, and who is the author of “The I Hate Madonna Handbook.” Recently, he hired as executive editor Lucette Lagnado, late of the Post and the Village Voice, where she was the “Urban Guerrilla” columnist. Lipsky and Lagnado have published some excellent pieces from Moscow, Washington, and Jerusalem as well as irreverent coverage of the world of Jewish politics and culture. There has been a string of fine articles by Jeffrey Goldberg, late of the Washington Post and the Israeli Defense Forces, on the feuds within the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, and investigative reports on alleged fraud in Orthodox communities regarding medical insurance and state educational grants. “We don’t have any sacred cows, kosher or otherwise,” Goldberg told me. “We want to cover the Jewish community as rigorously as the Times or the News covers City Hall. We don’t have that not-in-front-of-the-goyim sensibility.” According to associate editor Jonathan Rosen, the virtue of the Yiddish Forward is “that it took the imagination as seriously as news.” So, too, with the English edition. The paper has run excerpts from Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock,” David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom’s Biblical study “The Book of J,” and, in serial form, the second volume of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the cartoon saga of the Holocaust and the relationship between the artist and his survivor-father which won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Spiegelman, for his part, admires Lipsky’s news columns—“Their anti-Semite watch is a good one, and they have a nice Diaspora beat.” But he was astonished at the hawkish tone the editorial page took during the Gulf War. In despair, Spiegelman nearly pulled his strip, he said, “but the war ended too soon for me to act.” No matter how conservative Lipsky may be on certain subjects, especially foreign affairs, his stewardship of the paper has been open and daring. Recently, he ran a column by writer and editor Philip Gourevitch resisting “the notion that American Jewish culture can be understood as a matter of neurosis, cuisine, and television sitcoms”:

Sadly, a large portion—I’d venture that it’s close to 50%—of the material that comes in to this office for review or publication conceives of Jewishness as something defined from without by persecution or hostility. Sitting in this chair on a bad day, you might think that Jews had finally succumbed to Sartre’s insulting suggestion that if people stopped hating us we would cease to exist. . . . Sadder still is the fact that many Jews seem to cherish their self-perception as victims. This is a common idiocy of our age, hardly unique to Jews: to seek one’s value in one’s devaluation by others. We are hated, so we must be great enough to warrant hatred, the thinking goes, we are a cause, and easy righteousness is on our side.

Gourevitch’s article, which goes on to urge secular Jews to find their identity in learning and the traditions of Jewish culture, is just not the sort of thing you would expect to find in Jewish Week or Hadassah.

Whenever Lipsky is asked why he threw away a big-time career at the Wall Street Journal to edit the English-language Forward, he says, “I did it for the prestige.” He told me, “It’s true. These are serious thinkers here. The Forward has a Nobel Prize. So they’re not terribly impressed with Lipsky. It was just a question of trying to rise to their level.”

Visitors to the Forward office, however, notice that while the Yiddish and the English staffs work on the same floor, they hardly mix. (The segregation is social and editorial. Neither paper runs translated articles from the other.) There is a bit of a cultural gulf in their interests. There are no Talmudic scholars on the English side, and, next to some of his staffers, Lipsky is a regular Maimonides. At one meeting, the English staff was talking about Hanukkah, and a reporter could not follow the drift.

“What’s a dreidel?” he asked.

Jonathan Rosen, a Yale graduate who has also served as cultural editor and executive editor, told me that, while the two sides come from different worlds, there is tremendous respect not only of the younger for the older but vice versa. The older generation is not the least bit deluded about the future of the Yiddish Forward, and hopes that the publication will go on, at least in English. “The Forward is a little like the State of Israel. It had a history, and now it has a history again,” Rosen said. “I’ll tell my parents’ friends that I work for the Forward and their faces will beam, because they want so much to believe that Yiddish is being reborn. But Yiddish culture was disappearing even before the Holocaust. Shtetl life was changing. Lots of what we call Yiddish culture—films like ‘The Dybbuk,’ which was made in Poland in the thirties—was already a self-conscious re-creation. Not authentic, already romanticized. What looks to us like authentic old Yiddish culture was already being made in a twilight era.”

Rosen went on, “The Yiddish Forward led a generation of American Jews into American life. Now they need to be led back to the sources of their culture. They have been born into ignorance—ignorance, not merely secularism. It’s a little like the breakup of the Soviet Union. No one is Soviet anymore. You are Russian, Ukrainian. In the multicultural revolution, the notion of being American is not the same as it was. Jews have to discover that unless they embrace their identity they are not part of the equation. Jews are searching for an affiliation. Sometimes reading a newspaper can be an affiliation.” ♦

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